Er, yeah, I think we all know what you meant. You yourself understand that the guy was being a "SmartAss®" (i.e. he knew what you meant but deliberately misinterpreted it), so not sure why you bothered re-explaining the bit in bold!

That's no way to talk about Linus, even if he did leave his door unlocked!

Maybe he really *did* find out what she looks like, but considers her way below *his* standards...

Clearly you have never been to the UCLA campus because, if you had, you would have known this isn't true in the least. You can walk all over that place.

The problem in LA is the culture. People believe they are to be seen in their automobiles and they buy or lease expensive cars and drive them ridiculously short distances for that sole reason (if there is another reason, please do share but nothing really makes sense).

I worked for a company based out of LA for 2.5 years and we were there often. One guy lived a 10 minute walk from the office but chose to drive each and every day. He didn't buy an M3 to have it sit in his garage, after all. Nope, it sat in the company's garage instead.

SMH.

Yeah... I suspect the film's still going to be written by a different author though. Well, unless there have been significant improvements in ouija board technology I wasn't aware of...

Isn't this a problem with the (already mentioned) audio range compression- AKA "loudness war" where the quiet bits are made louder and hence the (already as loud as they can be) loud bits don't sound as much louder by comparison.

I noticed this with one song on a Vangelis compilation I got from a shop that- compared with the vinyl version- lacks "punch" when the expected increase in volume should come in.

This comes across as a second-hand, simplistic interpretation of something that was a fallacy to begin with. This is a fallacy that's either explicitly or implicitly used as the (flawed) basis of arguments, even on Slashdot.

The fallacy is that because "analogue" as a *purely abstract* concept can in theory have infinite precision- as opposed to digital (which by definition has a clearly-defined level of precision)- then an analogue medium like vinyl records must inherently be able to hold more detail than a digital one like (e.g.) compact discs.

Problem is, that argument could then be applied to any analogue medium (not just vinyl), so that e.g. a cheap, worn-out audio cassette recording made on a portable recorder in the early 70s must also be inherently superior to a CD, or even to a 24-bit, 96KHz digital master(!!!)

This makes the flaw in the argument more obvious, but it's still a flaw when applied to vinyl. The problem is that we're talking about actual, real-world examples of analogue media, not the abstract concept. In real life, no analogue medium can have infinite bandwidth, so they quite obviously *do* have inherent limits of precision and quality- just not as clearly delineated as those of digital. (*)

Of course, you might argue that we could engineer our analogue media to higher standards... but similarly, we could (theoretically) engineer a higher resolution and sampling rate into digital media, so there is no inherent argument in that either way.

Furthermore, by definition, a "perfect" analogue copy would require infinite perfection in the duplication process (clearly impossible) and the ability to verify this to infinite levels of precision (ditto). So by definition *any* analogue copy will be imperfect.

This isn't to say that CD is better than vinyl, or that digital is better than analogue. Maybe vinyl *is* better... maybe not. What it *is* saying is that the "analogue is infinite and digital is limited" argument *in itself* is flawed, and not a valid basis for drawing a conclusion either way. One can make comparisons where either is the clear winner- a good quality analogue turntable setup (and LP) will quite obviously sound better than a grungy 4-bit digital sample "bit bashed" through a C64 or Atari 800 sound chip. But the aforementioned 24-bit, 96KHz digital master will blatantly knock spots off an analogue C90 cassette recorded in 1973.

(*) One may be scientifically able to calculate the meaningful upper limit of cassette bandwidth and the noise floor by (e.g.) looking at the maximum theoretical magnetisation possible, spacing of the grains, et al... both in theory and in practice. I can't tell you what those limits are, but I can be quite confident that they'll exist, and hence dictate the maximum sound quality.

What are you talking about? The company "ITV plc" (which has only existed since 2004) or the ITV network?

Remember that "ITV" was originally- and still is- the collective name given to the network of (once independent) regional franchisees for the main commercial TV station.

It was only after the franchisees were allowed to merge- starting in the 90s- that the two largest remaining companies merged to become "ITV plc" in 2004. Before that, there wasn't an ITV company, just a bunch of separate companies that generally cooperated. And there are still two companies (STV and UTV) that are on the ITV network but not part of "ITV plc".

So, yeah, there were plenty of "ITV" shows exported before 2004, but those were made by various different companies.

Not unless they license that show, since it was made by ATV/ITC for the ITV network, not the BBC. (*)

Unless, of course, I misunderstood you, and you were referring to a bizarre episode of It's a Knockout. ;-)

(*) Ditto this post regarding the "all British TV programmes were made by the BBC" fallacy Americans and others seem to hold.

The article does claim that he was on the BBC- albeit even then not exclusively- in his early career, but moved to Thames in the late 60s. Still, this is another example of how Americans(?) always assume that British Television = BBC.

Since his move occurred just before BBC1 and ITV started colour transmissions, it's safe to say that any "Benny Hill Shows" in colour weren't made by the BBC.

"RED DWARF"... "make it so"?!

Subtle troll is subtle. :-)

I'm pretty sure companies don't care about a single lost sale, and even a low number of lost sales to geeks caused by DRM et al (if they're aware of it) will be considered a minor tradeoff against the monetary benefit of being able to lock in and (profitably) screw over the large number of people who *will* still be buying it anyway.

(This is the same situation as with the PSP et al being locked down and a couple of geeks saying "you lost a sale". Big deal, they lost a sale to people who probably weren't going to buy lots of games (where they make the most profit) and retained the ability to milk the remaining 99.5% of people who were still going to buy it for lots more money).

The best way to hit them where it hurts is to spread the word about how lousy and hostile to the user Keurig's machines are, preferably in terms that the ordinary user will understand (i.e. you *can't* use generic pods, you *will* have to pay more because Keurig want your money, and if you can't get the official Keurig ones, tough).

Ultimately, giving them an abstract lecture about DRM will probably turn them off, explaining *why* this particular example of DRM is lousy for them is a preferential backdoor in propaganda terms. (Though I wouldn't shove the term DRM down their throats).

I said most people used them for games; that, as the other guy said, still leaves a small but significant percentage who *did* end up programming them. It's just that a lot more of them were basically bought for games playing. And I think the "word processing" thing is a bit of a strawman; the Spectrum never had a reputation as a home office or business machine anyway.

The VCS/2600 was around for five years before the Spectrum. Some people here did own it; it just wasn't as ubiquitous.I don't know when it launched in the UK, but I'm assuming that a combination of the fact it (as an imported machine and going by the rule of thumb) was probably more expensive here than in the US along with the fact that people in the UK had lower rates of income (and hence disposable income) to spend on a still relatively expensive machine contributed to most people not buying one- regardless of whether the Spectrum was out or not.

As for the original NES, yes, though it wasn't a flop here, it wasn't remotely as dominant as it was (apparently) in the US. It's known that- until well into the 90s- Nintendo didn't really take Europe that seriously or push as hard there. The Mastertronic-distributed Sega Master System outsold the NES here- possibly because Mastertronic was a UK company and more in tune with the UK market. Even so, the UK market remained far more home computer driven than the US until the Mega Drive/SNES started selling in large numbers circa 1992. Oddly, *their* cartridges weren't easily pirated, unlike Amiga games (which lost ground to the 16-bit consoles around this time); yet the consoles weren't so much better than the Amiga that they would have beaten it if piratability of games was the only factor.

I work in marketing analytics and, specifically, in measuring the effectiveness of online marketing campaigns at a customer level. Straight up click tracking is dead and this will do nothing which is purports as organizations begin moving away from siloed measurement of IMP -> CLK within single channels at an aggregate level and instead go down to the very granular cross-channel customer-level attribution.

If you really want to avoid detection and behavior tracking, I highly suggest you entirely disable cookies entirely (yes, I realize this is not worth it at all), otherwise you will not have accomplished what you had hoped.

All that is true, and I'm aware of it, but it misses the point. The point wasn't why the ZX81 didn't last long- that, of course, was because it was superseded.

The point I was making was why the Spectrum *did* last so much longer despite also being eclipsed in purely technical terms. That, as I mentioned, was because it was the first machine "good enough" for arcade games and "good enough" for its existing software base to have value. The mid-80s point circa the Amstrad buyout, when "serious" support started to fade was (I'm guessing) the point at which the non-gaming hobbyist/enthusiast market moved on to more advanced machines, and the point at which it probably would have faded if it was being purchased for the same reasons as the ZX81. It didn't- it lasted well the early 90s, i.e. past the start of the Mega Drive era!

Also, the original unexpanded ZX81 had a full 1KB; still a tiny amount by most standards, but not the almost unusable 256 bytes (i.e. "1/4k") that you suggest. The Atari VCS/2600 had an even tinier 128 bytes (plus one line of screen memory), but that was a much older machine and intended to run programs stored on external ROM, so the RAM there was "only" needed for keeping track of scoring players, etc. Still an incredibly small amount, though.